Twitter Acquires Gnip

http://blog.gnip.com/

by noinput • 12 years ago

129 41 12 years ago

blog.gnip.com

willu3• 12 years ago

Interesting, I had gotten the impression Twitter was aligning itself more with DataSift in recent years. I used Gnip a few years ago and thought it was a great service, although the high price point drove us to ultimately roll our own.

mynameisasdf• 12 years ago

By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?

techpeace• 12 years ago

I had the same question when I read this. The streaming API is only a fraction of the data offered by the firehose, but that's not as much of a problem in every use case.

willu3• 12 years ago

Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.

joeblau• 12 years ago

Congrats to those guys. I worked with their service for about a year and they had a great product.

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

does this mean that they will no longer sell non-twitter data like Foursquare?

AznHisoka• 12 years ago

So Twitter basically acquired their own data? Hmm.. more proof I dun know how Silicon Valley works.

waterside81• 12 years ago

I'm a customer of Gnip's - they provider several enrichments and data normalizations on top of Twitter's stream. Could Twitter have hired X engineers and duplicated what Gnip does? Perhaps - but Gnip also has an existing customer base, existing revenue flow, infrastructure setup to handle customers creating their own matching rules etc.

There's more to Gnip than just re-selling the Twitter firehose.

thefreeman2• 12 years ago

Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

metajack• 12 years ago

Or buying their way out of the data contract Gnip has?

mbesto• 12 years ago

I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.

Capital is raised by companies to accelerate growth. Growth acceleration can manifest itself in many ways. Specifically, in this case, as you rightfully point out, Twitter could easily build this service themselves. They also, at the time of Gnip's inception weren't totally sure there was a business model here.* So they let another organization take that risk for them, instead of using their own capital. They end up paying more capital in the long run but the risk is reduced.

*I recognize that most likely the certainty of Gnip's business model is (1) much higher due to the "duh, of course people want this" nature of their business and (2) that the people investing here are all "in this together". It, however, doesn't negate the fact that there is indeed risk.

applecore• 12 years ago

Twitter provides their raw data to multiple outside companies. These companies compete with each other to add value to the raw data, while Twitter focuses on solving its core problems. Everyone wins. (Except Twitter's users, who make these companies millions of dollars without a penny in return.)

enjo• 12 years ago

I would imagine Twitters users are getting some kind of value of out of the service. Otherwise they wouldn't use it.

MCarusi• 12 years ago

Congrats!

pincubator2• 12 years ago

I guess that makes Twitter data cheaper than before? Last time when I contacted them for one week of worth tweets (with some filters on top) they wanted me to pay tens of thousands dollars. I ended up crawling the data myself.

brianbreslin• 12 years ago

were you able to get firehose access for that? or were you just spidering the public tweet stream?

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Most likely spidering; its difficult/expensive to get firehose access.

pincubator2• 12 years ago

no, i just used streaming api to gather the data. you can crawl surprisingly more data with streaming api as opposed to regular api.

PanMan• 12 years ago

Interesting: It seems twitter now does see distributing their data as a valid businessmodel (before they 'outsourced' this to DataSift and Gnip). Wonder what it will mean for the other sources Gnip has, and for the customers of Datasift.

thevaibhav• 12 years ago

I've often wondered if there's any hidden terminology in some of these press release, eg: "http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/twitter-buys-gnip-taking-o...

"To that end, we have agreed to acquire Gnip" - I'm wondering for example if the "agreed to acquire Gnip" means that Twitter doesn't see this as a high-value acquisition on the same level as Crashlytics or Mopub.

nacs• 12 years ago

I found that phrasing weird in the blog as well: "Today I’m pleased to announce that Twitter has agreed to acquire Gnip".

Makes it sound like they almost forced the acquisition on Twitter.

I'm not sure that Gnip is a 'high value acquisition' for Twitter though - AFAIK they're basically just re-streaming Twitter fire hose data which Twitter could do themselves. This is probably just a way for Twitter to lock down/get even more control over their ecosystem.

spullara• 12 years ago

The wording is generally used because the transaction has been agreed t though it may not have been completed officially / legally.

nostromo• 12 years ago

"we’ve agreed to acquire MoPub"

https://blog.twitter.com/2013/driving-mobile-advertising-for...

samstave• 12 years ago

Maybe that language indicates who has the leverage in the deal and thus reflects in their stock price - post-buy.

It would be interesting analizing the phrases surrounding acquisitions both public and private may reveal this...

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

Sorry, off topic, but:

Question: is Twitter's free "garden hose" sampled data stream still available?

I used to use the small garden hose sample of near real time tweets. I just tried running an old script to fetch the garden hose and it didn't work.

On topic: I thought that the Gnip business model was interesting, and I can't help but think that the other data sources that Gnip processes and resells may not like this aquisition.

Ianvdl2• 12 years ago

Yes it is.

The API changed and now requires authentication, so that might be why your script wasn't working.

dfgonzalez• 12 years ago

Are you sure the Garden Hose has free access? I can't find any public access to it in the docs, everything directs me to their "data partners", which charge for this information.

Avishai_Bitton• 12 years ago

Mazal Tov, but this isn't the game changer I was hopping for (:

elwell2• 12 years ago

I wonder what this will mean for Gnip's biggest competitor, DataSift.

elwell2• 12 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no-change...

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

Either Ghostery or AdBlock prevent the actual content of the blog post from loading. Please don't rely on Javascript to load content like that.

jstalin• 12 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted but I logged in to same the same thing. This blog is blank to me.

robryan• 12 years ago

He is being downvoted because it is crazy to expect websites to work around the bugs in various 3rd party plugins. This is an issue for the plugins to fix.

Xorlev• 12 years ago

Best of luck to the Gnip guys -- they're a great group of people.

pauldunstone• 12 years ago

Not surprising to see Twitter finally acquire Gnip after working with them for four years. A great achievement for the team at Gnip, and will be interesting to watch the data model they intend on developing with Gnip as time goes on.

Twitter Acquires Gnip

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